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Talk:After the Downfall
Much to my ever-growing frustration. And I don't even want to read it! I'm much more interested in Britannia's Fist, which is in a similar limbo. Turtle Fan 04:02, 13 September 2008 (UTC) Saw it in a bookstore yesterday and read the first chapter. The premise is so ridiculous that it might be an amusing read but I'll wait until the library has a copy. I did make some notes, enough for some stub articles anyway. ML4E 02:45, 14 December 2008 (UTC) The premise is indeed rather out there but it's a serious novel. Explores themes of racism and cultures' beliefs in their own inherent superiorities over their neighbors. A Nazi finds himself in a war very much like the early days of the Eastern Front, and falls into the same old Untermenschen bullshit, but at one point he sees the error of his ways and gets the chance to rehabilitate himself as a multiculturalist by switching sides to the not-Slavs' side. I haven't read it either. Some day I'll get around to it. Maybe when it's a paperback. I've also perused it in bookstore cafes from time to time. Turtle Fan 07:56, 14 December 2008 (UTC) I agree that it is seriously intended and may well get there too, but the first chapter seemed cartoonish to me. ML4E 20:15, 14 December 2008 (UTC) My own cafe perusals have been more homogeneous, I've read snatches from throughout the book, and it does achieve an appropriately somber tone. A bit to my disappointment, actually--when I first saw HT was releasing a new fantasy but knew nothing else about it, I was hoping for another adventure/madcap comedy gem like EIaK. Turtle Fan 05:48, 15 December 2008 (UTC) Well I had a gift card, B&N had the mass market edition in stock, I couldn't find all of the books I'd intended to buy with the card, and I'm now proud owner of AtD. It's printed on thick paper, which makes the book look intimidatingly long. ("The covers of this book are too far apart." -Ambrose Bierce) Wasn't planning to get around to it any time soon, honestly. I'm going to start HW this weekend, and TGS comes out less than two months after that, and LA comes out less than two months after that, so throwing in a fourth, long, HT novel may leave me Turtledove'd out. I might save it for next year when HT's production of new books is expected to be extra-light. Turtle Fan 04:58, 15 August 2009 (UTC) Inconsistency Some dude from the Crappy Board--one of those technical detail types--has given us fodder for an AtD section on the Inconsistencies page: Turtle Fan 20:53, 28 January 2009 (UTC) Jerry Butkus posts on 1/18/2009 12:40:42 PM Just finished reading "After the Downfall", and enjoyed it very much as usual with Harry Turtledove's books. But I would like to point out one technical error concerning the weapon Pemsel had. The machine pistol he had was referred to as a Schmeisser, when it is actually an MP-40. That is a common error as Hugo Scmeisser did not develop the MP-40, but he did have a patent on the MP-40's magazine. The Schmeisser name was stamped on the magazine, so when captured by American troops they mistakenly called the MP-40 a Schmeisser. :Let's go ahead and add it then, although I think the disclaimer about it being a common error is probably also worth adding. TR 21:09, 28 January 2009 (UTC) ::Maybe. I don't like editorializing the Inconsistencies--We're there to report the facts, not explain them away. Turtle Fan 22:58, 28 January 2009 (UTC) :::True, but this error does not appear unique to Turtledove, and it seems fair to note that. TR 23:03, 28 January 2009 (UTC) ::::If it's that common a mistake, it might be useful to have such a note so that someone who made it themselves doesn't come up and say "Hey! Indeed it was a Schmeisser!" On the other hand, how many people are prepared to admit to being mistaken themselves, no matter how common the mistake might be? Turtle Fan 06:39, 29 January 2009 (UTC) On another note, I wish at least one of us would read AtD. It seems somehow inappropriate to let a new release go by un-encyclopedized, or at the very least with none of us competent to discuss it. I'm tempted to read it from time to time myself, but I seem to keep finding better things to do. Anyway, at most I'd be willing to pay mass market paperbac prices for it, based on what I know of the rather simplistic and unoriginal story: It sounds like just another "Move real history to a fantasy realm" with the twist of a character who was a witness to the real history himself--a very minor twist indeed, when one realizes that the POV character is only adding his voice to the thoughts the reader is already having on the similarities. Or at least that's my take on it; if I ever get around to it, I might be pleasantly surprised. Turtle Fan 06:39, 29 January 2009 (UTC) Summary The summary section of this article blows. Unfortunately, none of us are competent to improve it. Oh well. Turtle Fan 15:59, August 18, 2010 (UTC) Auto-plagiarism Flipping through this novel again after reading HT's previous fantasies, I'm struck by how unoriginal it is. The world-building simply takes a little bit of Videssos, a little bit a Detina, and a little bit of Derlavai - and possibly a little bit of Elabon, though I haven't read much of that - and mixes them into a whole which doesn't even amount to the sum of its parts. A huge portion of the page count is filled up by Hasso Pemsel's inner monologues where he repeatedly realises "Gee, maybe I wasn't on the right side of World War II after all!" which is preaching to the choir as long as the reader has even the slightest knowledge of the 1940s. The characters are all stock archetypes with interchangeable personalities, so that one might suddenly "remember" an experience of another and I'd never notice. The Aryans-versus-Jews metaphor is pretty in-your-face and howlingly obvious, he doesn't even mad-lib the hair colours like he did in Detina and Derlavai. I wonder why HT thought this story was worth telling. It might have been passable as a novella, or a quick short in the nature of "After the Last Elf is Dead", but not the padded snooze fest we got instead.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 21:25, November 8, 2018 (UTC)